• Manfred Nowak (7/7) Nov 16 2005 http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qw.html
• Sean Kelly (20/28) Nov 16 2005 Have you seen Horus? The price tag might be a bit steep for home

Manfred Nowak <svv1999 hotmail.com> writes:

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qw.html
is raising the amd design to its limits.

I am still blushing under the thought to develop something in D for 
such hardware. We are at the cusp of public available massive 
parallel machines.

Who feels prepared for such?

-manfred

Sean Kelly <sean f4.ca> writes:

Manfred Nowak wrote:
 http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qw.html
 is raising the amd design to its limits.
 
 I am still blushing under the thought to develop something in D for 
 such hardware. We are at the cusp of public available massive 
 parallel machines.
 
 Who feels prepared for such?

Have you seen Horus?  The price tag might be a bit steep for home 
machines, but I'm very excited about the possibilities:

http://www.hypertransport.org/docs/tech/horus_external_white_paper_final.pdf
http://www.realworldtech.com/includes/templates/articles.cfm?ArticleID=RWT120104202353&mode=print

Based on in-house performance comparisons between a single Opteron and a 
Sparc NUMA machine (the Opteron is orders of magnitude faster than the 
Sparc when operating on medium to large datasets), I'm very excited 
about SMP Opterons for concurrent programming.  I'm also quite 
interested to see lock-free performance comparisons between a fully 
loaded Horus machine and a Sparc, given the glaring differences in the 
memory model between these two platforms.  In the long term however, I 
have a feeling systems will be converging on the Release Consistency 
model (similar to the Itanium) as it seems a good compromise between 
simplicity and speed.  By comparison, the x86 implements Processor 
Consistency and in practice is actually Sequentially Consistent in most 
cases.  This being the case, I'm surprised the Opteron scales as well as 
it does.  It's a real testament to the memory controller architecture in 
this design.  Go AMD :-)


Sean